Kylar opened his eyes to the soft scratch of pencil and the faint, shared huff of breath beside him.

  For a moment he didn’t move, letting his vision adjust. The lamplight turned everything to gold and shadow. Kairi and Jayce were bent a little closer together than before, the journal between them like a secret. Kairi’s hair curled against Jayce’s shoulder; Jayce’s hand moved in small, careful strokes, then paused while she took the pen and answered.

  They weren’t whispering. They didn’t have to. They had a whole other way to talk when they didn’t want the room to hear.

  Something in him went tight and hollow at once.

  Of course they have their own language, he thought. Of course they do. You’re the one passing through.

  He knew better. He knew Jayce was family to her, knew Kairi had had years here before a masked prince ever stepped over the threshold. Knowing didn’t stop the brief, sharp twist in his chest, like he’d walked into a conversation halfway through and realized it had started long before he’d even known the room existed.

  He pushed a breath out slow through his nose, trying not to make a sound.

  Shadowguard, he reminded himself. Keep the perimeter. Keep your feet. Don’t make this about you.

  He straightened, careful not to jostle Kairi, and rolled his shoulders like a man standing up after a long sit.

  “I’m going to check the yard,” he said, voice as even as he could make it. “Make sure the lane’s quiet.”

  Kairi glanced up, surprise flickering through her eyes, then softened into acceptance. “All right,” she said. “Don’t let anyone kidnap you.”

  He managed half a grin for her. “I’ll do my best.”

  Rush’s gaze flicked up from Tessa’s hands for the span of a heartbeat as Kylar moved past, something knowing and unreadable in it, but he didn’t speak.

  The night met Kylar at the door with a breath of cooler air. He stepped out onto the small stoop and let it fold around him, closing the door gently behind.

  Outside, Brindlecross had settled. The last of the light bled out of the sky at the horizon, leaving a thick dark stitched with a few lanterns farther down the lane. Somewhere a dog barked once and then thought better of it. The smithy was only a hulking shape now, its fires banked low.

  Kylar descended the steps and began to walk.

  Yard first. Fence line. Count the steps between the corner of the house and the lane, between the water trough and the low stone wall that edged the front. Catalog the shadows, the likely approach lines, the ways a man with bad intentions might think. It was what he knew how to do when his thoughts felt too big: shrink the world to distances and angles, something solvable.

  After one circuit his breathing had steadied. After the second, his mind had not.

  He ended up at the front anyway, palms braced on the cool top of the stone wall. It came up to mid-thigh, an easy perch if you were inclined to sit. He wasn’t. He leaned into it instead, letting the rough stone bite his bare forearms, eyes on the narrow ribbon of lane and deeper dark beyond.

  He tipped his head back to look at the sliver of sky he could see between the rooflines. No stars yet. Just a deep, quiet blue.

  He heard the door open behind him before he felt the shift in the air.

  “Lane’s clear?” Jayce asked, voice low, more for the night than the house.

  “Clear enough,” Kylar said without turning. “Couple of lanterns still lit. Nothing that looks like trouble.”

  “Good.” Footsteps on the dirt. Jayce came up beside him and, instead of stopping, hopped lightly onto the wall, boots finding their balance on the narrow top. He sat there, elbows on his knees, giving Kylar the courtesy of height without crowding.

  “You looked like you were going to crawl out of your own skin in there,” he said.

  Kylar huffed a small breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Professional assessment?”

  “Personal,” Jayce said. He tugged the journal out from under his arm, flipped to the page from earlier, and held it out so Kylar could see in the low light. His thumb rested casually across the lower corner, covering a few lines.

  Across the top, in Jayce’s neat script: What’s got your attention?

  Below, in Kairi’s smaller, firm hand: He just seems like he can’t relax. Worried.

  Further down, her looping: He looks like he hasn’t rested in weeks. Like his head is too loud.

  Jayce’s reply: New town. Important escort. Your brother watching his work. He wants a good report when we go back. Maybe even a better assignment next time.

  And beneath that, the part that caught at Kylar’s chest: He’s the sort who doesn’t like failing people. Even once. He actually gives a damn.

  Just above Jayce’s thumb, Kylar saw it: a small arrow she’d drawn from gives a damn to the margin, and the neat little Why? she’d tucked there.

  He heard her in it, questioning, weighing what Jayce had written. Looking for the missing piece.

  Kylar lifted a finger and tapped the arrow. “That one,” he said, voice low. “Almost gave me away.”

  Jayce’s mouth quirked. “She asks good questions,” he said. Then he shifted his hand, sliding his thumb down so it covered more of the lower page—whatever was written there stayed his business—and left the underlined gives a damn and the little Why? fully visible. “She is noticing you.”

  Kylar took that in, the words and the ink both, and a small, reluctant smile flashed across his face before he could stop it. Quick as a spark, there and gone.

  Jayce’s eyes caught it anyway. “Careful,” he said, amused. “If you smile like that around her, you’re going to ruin your whole ‘just the guard’ act.”

  Kylar rolled his eyes and looked back toward the lane. “You showed me this on purpose?” he asked, the tightness in his chest not entirely gone, but looser now, like a band had shifted.

  “Mm.” Jayce tilted the book back, snapped it shut with his thumb before Kylar could lean any lower and risk seeing more than he meant him to. “She’s just worried about you, Ky. Not scared of you. Not annoyed you’re here. Worried.” He slid the journal back under his arm. “I figured letting you see that might pry you out of whatever hole you were digging in your own head.”

  Kylar turned his face toward the dark. “It’s not a hole,” he said, after a moment. “Just… a lot. Rush talked to me a bit earlier.”

  Jayce made a quiet, understanding sound. “Ah. That’ll do it.” He didn’t ask what had been said. With Rush, he could guess the shape: sharp questions, heavier truths. “I know,” he went on aloud, and he did. Kylar could hear it. “New front. New rules. Girl you’re trying very hard to impress.” His mouth curved. “It’s a lot.”

  Kylar winced. “I’m not—”

  “You are,” Jayce said mildly. “It’s all right. Not exactly subtle.”

  Kylar dragged a hand over his face. “That obvious?”

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  “Only to people who know what they’re looking at,” Jayce said. “Rush. Tessa. Me.” He shrugged, still balanced on the wall. “Kairi just thinks you’re kind and a little over-serious.”

  That didn’t help as much as it should have. “And you don’t mind?” Kylar asked quietly. “Her leaning on you like that, while I…”

  “While you what?” Jayce cut in gently. “Do your job? Sit on the couch and try not to pass out where she can see the bruises?”

  Kylar blew out a breath, the ghost of a laugh tangled in it.

  “For what it’s worth,” Jayce went on, eyes on the lane, “she’s leaned on me like that pretty much since my first year here. She wasn’t much younger than she is now. It’s habit. Comfort. Not a declaration.” He flicked Kylar a sidelong look. “If she wanted to declare anything, trust me, you’d notice.”

  Kylar sighed, staring at the dark line of the lane. “How do you know it isn’t one?” he asked, the question too honest not to slip out.

  Because I was there when it almost was, Jayce thought, but didn’t write, didn’t say. Instead he rolled his shoulder, the movement small. “Because I know what she looks like when she’s trying to talk herself into something,” he said. “And what she looks like when she already has. This isn’t that. This is ‘I’m tired, Jayce is here, this is where my head goes.’”

  Kylar didn’t say I know. He didn’t say she’d once told him, in another world, about the boy she might have chosen if life had been simpler, and how that boy had stepped aside. He just let that answer sit, and believed him.

  His ears still went hot in the night air. “That’s not reassuring,” he muttered.

  Jayce huffed. “It’s meant to be.” He tapped the journal against his knee. “You’re getting some winning points in, whether you mean to or not. You came. You stayed. You trained her until she could put you on the floor and walk away on her own feet. You’re out here checking the walls when you could be asleep.”

  Kylar snorted softly. “That’s just the work.”

  “Exactly,” Jayce said. “Work she can feel.”

  They fell into a quieter stretch, sharing the same cool air, listening to the muffled sounds of the house behind them.

  “Look,” Jayce said at last, his voice softening, “I don’t know what’s going on in your head between Brindlecross and the capital. I don’t need to. I just need you steady on this road. For her, and for Rush, and for whatever storm you three are walking into.”

  Kylar nodded once, the movement small but real. “I know how to do steady,” he said. He hesitated, then added, more quietly, “I just hope my heart can remember how.”

  Jayce’s head tilted, considering that. “That’s the nasty trick of it,” he said. “Bodies and training are easy. Hearts… take longer to drill.” His mouth quirked. “Doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to feel it and still hold the line.”

  “I’ll work on that,” Kylar said dryly.

  “I know,” Jayce said. “I’ve seen it.”

  He hopped down from the wall, boots hitting dirt with a soft thud, and clapped Kylar once on the shoulder, the way he might in the yard before a long patrol. “Come back in when you’re ready. If you stay out here too long, she’ll worry more, and then I’ll have to write it down, and you’ll have to read it, and we’ll both be embarrassed.”

  A corner of Kylar’s mouth lifted again, smaller but more deliberate this time. “Threatening me with documentation now?”

  “Absolutely,” Jayce said. “Nothing terrifies a prince like written evidence.”

  Kylar squinted at him. “You going to write ‘love at first sight’ in there somewhere?”

  Jayce barked a soft laugh. “Not yet,” he said. “But since we’re sharing…”

  He tugged the journal back out, flipped to the earlier page, and this time moved his thumb entirely off the bottom. In the margin, smaller than the rest, Kairi’s last line sat where she’d tried to make it a joke:

  Also, he’s cute.

  “There,” Jayce said. “Figured I owed you that much. Might perk you up.”

  Kylar stared at the words. Something in his chest did a strange, painful, hopeful twist.

  “She was covering herself,” he said, almost at once, because he knew her, knew the way she put humor over anything too sharp. “Got too invested and threw that on top so you wouldn’t look too closely.”

  “Maybe,” Jayce allowed. “Doesn’t make it untrue.”

  Kylar’s mouth did that small, quick-vanishing smile again.

  Jayce pointed at it. “See? Perked up,” he said, satisfied. “All right. That’s enough meddling from me for one night.”

  He started back toward the house, then paused at the bottom step and looked back. “Ky.”

  Kylar glanced over.

  “You’re doing all right,” Jayce said simply. “Better than you think. Try to let that in, before your brain throws it out with the rest.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, just went inside, letting the door click softly shut behind him.

  Kylar stayed at the wall a moment longer, fingers resting on the stone, letting the words settle where they wanted. Worried, Kairi had written. Not of him—for him. He actually gives a damn, Jayce had written, and she’d pressed ink over it. And, small in the margin, like a dare and a shield at once: Also, he’s cute.

  It hurt, and helped, in the same breath.

  He drew in one last lungful of cool night air, feeling it move through lungs and the aching, hopeful place under his ribs, squared his shoulders, and turned back toward the warm spill of lamplight at the door.

  The latch clicked softly. Then it was just the lamplight, the tick of the cooling stove, Rush and Tessa’s quiet back-and-forth in the corner as she shaped his hands through another sign.

  Kairi stared at the closed door.

  What if he thinks I don’t care, whispered one thought. What if he needs me and doesn’t know how to ask here. What if Rush said something sharp. What if he’s regretting coming. What if—

  She forced herself to breathe, the way he would remind her to in the storms. Four in. Four out. The book opened again; her eyes found her place by habit. The duke was still somewhere between lost and brave. She wondered what it would feel like to have your rescuer have that much certainty.

  Time stretched. Not long, not by clock standards, but long enough for the lamplight to soften and her what-ifs to knot themselves into something small and tight under her ribs.

  The door opened again.

  Jayce stepped back inside, cooler air following him. His expression was easier now, something smoothed behind his eyes.

  “I’m going to sleep,” he announced lightly, aiming it more at the room than any one person. “If anyone wakes before me in the morning, I give you full permission to throw something.”

  That, at least, was normal.

  “Oh—wait.” Kairi was already halfway up, book left facedown on the cushion to keep her place. “You’re taking the couch. Let me get bedding.”

  Rush started to move, but she was quicker, already crossing to the cupboard where they kept the extra blankets. She hauled out a rolled pallet and a folded quilt, hugged them to her chest, and brought them to Jayce.

  He took them with a grateful little bow. “My savior,” he said. “Again.”

  “Don’t steal my book,” she countered, nodding toward the one he’d left on the side table.

  He made a solemn gesture over his heart and busied himself making up the couch.

  The door opened a second time.

  Kylar slipped back in, the night still clinging faintly to his shoulders, along with a thin edge of cooler air and pine. His gaze skimmed the room—windows, doors, people—before landing on her.

  “Hey,” she said, a little too quick, then softened it. “Want to help me real quick?”

  He nodded at once, the answer easier than words. “Of course.”

  She turned toward the cupboard again. “We need a few more things for Tessa and you,” she explained for the room’s benefit. “I forgot to grab them earlier.”

  Rush made a low approving sound, already shifting to clear space for Tessa’s bedroll. Tessa waved them on, fingers flicking something amused that Kairi didn’t catch.

  Kairi led the way down the short hall toward the quieter back of the house, where the rooms pinched narrow and the lamplight didn’t quite reach. She pulled another rolled pallet off the low shelf, then reached for a folded blanket stacked above her head.

  It caught halfway, refused to budge.

  “Hold on,” Kylar said.

  He stepped in close, bracing one hand against the wall beside her shoulder and snagging the bundle with his other. It came free with a soft puff of dust. He set it on top of the pallet she was already carrying.

  “Thanks,” she said. Her voice sounded smaller in the close space.

  They stood there a second, both of them holding onto too much cloth and not quite looking at each other.

  Kairi shifted the bedding to one arm and, with the other hand, reached out to touch his forearm lightly. Bare skin under her fingertips, warm, solid, the faint raised memory of old training bruises.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, quiet enough that it belonged to the narrow hall and no farther.

  He looked down at her hand, then at her face. The instinct to say fine rose and died in the same breath. She was looking at his eyes, searching.

  “Mostly,” he said, honest in the ways he could be. “New place. Long day. Your brother… asks good questions.” A wry twist at the corner of his mouth. “Jayce helped. So did the air.”

  She nodded once. That sounded like him, too many thoughts, not enough room.

  “Advice,” she asked softly, “or just company?”

  That caught him, the shape of the question so familiar it almost hurt. He couldn’t stop the small huff of a laugh. “That’s not a fair choice,” he murmured. “You’re very good at both.”

  He hesitated, then, with the same courage he’d use to step into a spar he wasn’t sure he’d win, added in a whisper, “Hug?”

  Something in her unknotted at the ask. No storms. No blood. Just a man saying I’m tired in the only way he trusted himself to.

  She shifted the bedding aside to one hip and wrapped her arm around him.

  It wasn’t a careful, one-armed pat. She stepped in close, cheek brushing his shoulder, and gave him a small, firm squeeze. His arms came up around her a heartbeat later, folding her in with a care that still held strength under it.

  For a moment, the hall shrank down to warmth and breath and the steady weight of him. His heart was beating too fast when she first pressed in; she felt it slow by degrees against her. Her own found the rhythm without trying.

  She didn’t rush it. In the meadow, he never hurried her when she needed time to settle. Here, she could give him that back.

  Eventually, she eased her arms away, letting the hug dissolve rather than break. She stepped back half a pace, enough to see his face in the dim light.

  “Goodnight, Kylar,” she said, and the name sat soft and sure on her tongue.

  He took his share of the bedding from her, fingers brushing hers as he did. His eyes were clearer than they’d been when he walked out.

  “Sweet dreams, Kairi,” he answered.

  For a heartbeat, the words felt like a bridge between two worlds.

  Then he turned back toward the front room with the blankets in his arms, and she followed, the tight, anxious knot under her ribs loosened into something else—still sharp, still dangerous, but threaded through with a quiet, treacherous hope.